Japanese capitalism, Anglo-Saxon capitalism: how will the Darwinian contest turn out?

Dore, Ron and Layard, Richard
(1992)
Japanese capitalism, Anglo-Saxon capitalism: how will the Darwinian contest turn out?
Centre for Economic Performance occasional papers,
CEPOP04.
Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.

Abstract

Economic organization and economic behaviour in Japan - notably the employment relation, trading relations between business firms and the financing of industrial enterprise - are sufficiently different from prevailing patterns in the UK and the US for it to be reasonable to speak of different types of capitalism. If it be assumed that globalization will lead to institutional convergence in the long run, which type will predominate in the resultant world form ? The Anglo-Saxon one which conforms to the prescriptions of neoclassical economics and maximises factor mobility, or the Japanese one which apparently prospers by ignoring neoclassical recipes for allocative efficiency and concentrates, instead, on other kinds of efficiency ? The paper suggests some factors which have to be taken into account in searching for an answer, but hesitates to give one.